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Ryan Healy is a recent college graduate. He is a founder of 
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New here? Employee Evolution is a blog written by Ryan Healy. Ryan is a Co-Founder of Brazen Careerist, the webs #1 social network for young professionals. Ryan speaks with organizations on best practices for recruiting and retaining Generation Y and how to effectively use social media to reach your target market. To contact Ryan, please visit our contact page.
Like most people our age, my friends don’t really read blogs. So I created a My Space page to market my blog. At first, this worked out great. Our friends could see bulletins every time a new post went up and people got a better sense of what the blog was all about.
On top of this, every night before bed I left an AIM away message stating, “click here” and people would be sent to the site. I also updated my Facebook profile every time a new post went up. All of these things worked great for the first few weeks. My friends went to the site, and someone new would ask about it nearly every day.
Despite all of this, we realized that it is not easy to convert the average twentysomething to the wonderful world of the blogosphere. Even my friends and acquaintances that appreciate what I’m doing and compliment my site, do not frequent my blog or any other blog on a regular basis. And when they do visit the site they almost never leave a comment.
It’s ironic, though, because blogging is a way to deal with the biggest problem at the beginning of one’s career: No expertise. If you offer intelligent opinions or advice on a credible blog, then you are an expert. This is why more young people should blog. If you have a focused blog, then you can jump from job to job and learn many skills, but the constant will be that you are an expert in whatever area you choose to research and write about.
Leave your thoughts here. (5 responses)
- 1 Trackback on May 29th, 2007 at 11:01 am
- 2 Trackback on May 29th, 2007 at 11:02 am
While I think it would be a rewarding venture to start a blog, I don’t think you should expect everyone to just run to your blog on a regular basis. I get the bulk of my information through alerts from places like digg or an igoogle page filled with new stories. While I am taking in more information, I may not always want to be reading up on a specific employment blog for people my age. What you are doing is great, but as had been noted many times, our generation likes information fast, but not everyone is up to speed on rss feeds nor do they want to check multiple websites everyday to keep up with things.
Hey, just came across this from the top posts of 2007.
That’s a sad insight you provided about people not reading blogs. Blogs are a indeed a great way to 1) share your expertise, and- perhaps more importantly 2) gain a deeper expertise.
For several years, I’ve had a personal blog, where I rant, or put up short stories from time to time. But I’ve always been interested in politics, and just recently, I started a blog in order to sort of ‘force’ myself into learning more about politics.
And as far as encouraging others to read your (or any) blog, I think SJS makes a good point about rss feeds- thanks to igoogle, I’ve made an internet start page with the rss feed of about 10 blogs on it. It’s great because some of them update only once or twice a month, so I don’t have to keep checking them; instead, I just check one page, and see what I need to check on!
I’ve got a few friends that majored in journalism, and I keep on advising them to blog, because (although I don’t have a deep understanding of what journalism is) it seems to me that blogging is just a sort of grassroots journalism. With the additional benefit of the fact that you can submit “letters to the editor” almost instantly, and your potential audience is worldwide!
This is exactly why I have recently taken to blogging. I can understand why these people don’t frequent your blog. They’re not interested. Conversely, I feel very interested in the topics presented on this blog as well as other blogs like Penelope Trunk’s, which is why I’ve become an avid reader of them. But not everybody is looking to beat the curve. Some people are content remaining uninformed, and some have other pursuits which will lead them to their own sort of successes.
After only a few days of blogging, I feel a dozen times more educated, and aware of the job market I will enter in less than a year. It has become an important part of my life and my career, and I expect it remain one for some time to come.
Blogging isn’t a hobby. It’s a lifestyle.